Geforce 6800 to 7 series?

[onlyCOpunk]

Hello. Just wondering if upgrading from say a 6800 128mb to a 7600 256/512mb will yield a fair enough performance increase to warrant a purchase. I'm currently stuck with AGP, don't ask, and I'm not looking to upgrade my whole system.

I'm using a CPU of Athlon XP 2400 OCed to 2600 speeds. I'd upgrade the CPU, but I've appeared for some reason prices on computer parts go up when they get older.

 

[ConstipatedVigilante]

Don't bother. The 6800 and 7600 have very similar performance. You can get an X1950GT for about $100, which will be a good upgrade.

 

[cputeq]

To a 7600, I would say no. You'd get much better mileage from a X1950Pro AGP card. They run about $175ish at Newegg. Just do a videocard search for AGP 4x/8x interface and 512MB memory size, you get a big ole list =)

To make a rough comparison of all of these cards, check out Tom's VGA charts.
http://www23.tomshardware.com/...6&model2=725&chart=282

They give a good general comparison of cards from both ATI and Nvidia, though be warned this chart is a bit old and using older drivers.

 

[onlyCOpunk]

So now that I've been around the block researching this. I've come up with the x1950. Seeing as how my CPU is only an AthlonXP 2600, and I'm using a vanilla 6800 and I dn't plan on updating my CPU anytime soon, what video card would max it out? Since this is my last upgrade ever for this PC, I don't mind buying a lesser product if I know that my CPU will be a bottleneck.

I've been seeing some fairly good prices on x1650's like $100 or less. Or maybe I should just give up this battle and live with this PC for the next 4 months until I leave it behind.

 

[Piuc2020]

Yeah it won't be a bottleneck, many people are running P4 3.0GHz systems with X1950 AGPs and they are fine and a XP 2600 is definitely better than a P4 at 3.0, at least for games.

Also in any case, a 7600GT is a huge jump from a 6800 vanilla, like Bioshock at high settings 1280x1024 and Bioshock at low settings 800x600 difference.

But yeah I agree a X1950Pro wouldn't be a bad idea ofr your AGP system.

 

[onlyCOpunk]

I also think it's funny how some people are under the perception that if it isn't the newest it's no good. I've had many people laugh when I tell them the games I'm playing with my setup. But to tell you the truth, Bioshock is the only game that I've tried that is giving my PC any problems. I can run Quake 4 in High settings at 1920x1080, and it's very smooth. I haven't tried Oblivion because I have it for my PS3, but I would imagine it would also make my machine chug. But I can play Bioshock just fine at 720x480 on the "high" setting, if only the game wouldn't crash like it's been known to do.